Month / December 2012

DIGITIMES: According to industry sources, of course. Apple is reportedly further evaluating IGZO-based displays for the iPhone, iPad mini, and iPad in 2013. It’s not just Sharp at its Gen. 8 Kameyama No. 2 line, which commenced the production of IGZO LCDs in March 2012 and mass production a month later; AU Optronics (AUO) has its L5C line, too. Innolux may have also licensed IGZO from Sharp and manufacture IGZO LCDs on its Gen. 3 and Gen. 5 lines. So, potentially there’s three IGZO LCD suppliers in 2013: Sharp, AUO, and Innolux. But there might be more. Back on July 20, 2011 Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST) licensed patents related to IGZO to Samsung Electronics, but doesn’t mean Samsung is ready to mass manufacture IGZO LCDs. We will have to wait and see. But why IGZO? Imagine a retina iPad mini that’s thinner, lighter, and with a battery life exceeding 12 hours. Now that’s the iPad mini I’d want.

But the M9 also has slow shutter response, a slow image processor, slow shot-to-shot time, poor battery life, and a small, low-resolution screen, even by 2009â€™s standards.

Add:

“There’s also no autofocus […]”

“The sensor is mediocre at high ISOs […]”

“The rangefinder design also hurts short-distance framing […]”

The viewfinder doesn’t look through the lens, and then there’s the herculean price. Arment, who is clearly spoiled by the Canon 5D Mark II, concludes: “The Leica M9 is disappointing […].” I guess that’s one less thing to lust after.

Hiroki Uoyama, of Kyushu University in Japan, and colleagues designed a molecule that has a small energy difference between the singlet and triplet excitons. That way, triplet excitons can cross over to an excited singlet state and then relax to emit light.

What this means: More affordable than heavy metal-laden phosphorescent OLED with equivalent electricity to light efficiency of 19%.

The FlyVIZ headset may not make you stronger than a speeding bullet, or faster than a tall building, or able to leap locomotives in a single bound, but it will give you the superpower of being able to see all around you at once.

Take a very thin sheet of metal and drill it with tiny holes in a regular rectangular pattern. Ordinarily, if you shine light with wavelength that is larger than the holes, it wouldn’t get throughâ€”the metal would be opaque. However, in the case of this particular pattern of holes, a lot of the light gets through the sheet anyway, a phenomenon known as extraordinary optical tranmission (EOT).

Motorola also ran into difficulties when it looked into using a bendable screen and materials such as ceramics that would allow the company to make the X Phone more stress resistant, use more colors and mold into different shapes, these people said.

We do want more rugged phones out of the box, and without having to protect them with ugly cases. But a bendable screen? I think that’s the wrong approach. A bendable screen is easier said than done. Assuming a candybar design where the display is integrated into the chassis, a bendable display suggests a bendable chassis. Not impossible, but cost effectively mass manufacturing millions of bendable electronics are a ways off. A better approach would be to focus more on incremental innovations such as a cover glass-integrated display or waterproofing without making it ugly*.

* Something the Japanese have enjoyed for quite some time with smartphones like the Eluga by Panasonic.